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Why should you share knowledge? A big question?

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Further to my post on Should you share information?, I'd like to express my thoughts once more, based on a recent discussion with some colleagues . At the recent training I attended, I met a whole bunch of pre-sales and consulting people who were also there to learn more about the product. It was amazing that in a class of 20, we had people from at least 10 different countries! What was more important was that all of them had the task to sell the same products and were not really connected until this training. Thus the training was also very critical for them to network. Being the social media evangelist, I obviously suggested that people use our social tools and share their knowledge online. At a later point when we were discussing offline and I was suggesting to our trainer that he should share his experience online, the obvious debate came up. One of the colleagues started telling him that if he did so, someone else would learn his job and he could be replaced. My opinion of course is:
  • When you share your knowledge, you actually grow to the next level. Being a trainer he was obviously already sharing knowledge but in a limited forum.
  • Your clarity on the subject is further enhanced and you end up researching it further.
  • You have people in the community write back and add value to the content.
  • It is also practically impossible to share all the tacit knowledge you gained over several years. If you even attempted, you would perpetually always be on a blog or wiki and not have time for your actual job. That knowledge always stays with you and is your 'value' to the organization over what you share with other people.
  • Effectively, the percentage of people who read your information and get positively impacted and make the most of it, is a really small number when compared to the whole lot who have read it. Very few might have got the exact value you are trying to share.
  • Also it is important to remember that the knowledge you gain when part of an organization is also the organization's asset and not only yours.
I also suggest seeing the video who owns information.




From here I leave the rest open to debate.... Really, what do the rest of you think?
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Comments

  1. ganiMonday, August 17, 2009

    Great Post. Thanks for sharing the info. :-)

    ReplyDelete
  2. Robert Kennedy IIIMonday, August 17, 2009

    Sreya,

    Great post. As a former classroom teacher, I can safely say that I did not truly learn physics until I actually began to teach it. Once I began to twirl the info around in my mind and actually look for interesting/engagin ways to help the students learn it, certain things just became so much clearer to me. In fact, I sometimes wondered my OWN teachers never presented the information in that way to me. I think I would have gotten it more quickly :-). Whats more, as a teacher/trainer, you do the same things repeatedly and become so familiar with the information that you become an expert of sorts.

    ReplyDelete
  3. LSPMonday, August 17, 2009

    When we learn a subject, we just touch it. Only when we share it with others, we really get a deeper insight on it :) Very well written.

    ReplyDelete

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